Robert Creeley (1926 - 2005) was an American writer commonly associated with the group known as the Black Mountain Poets. He is now widely recognized as one of the most influential poets of the last half-century. He was known for his compressed and straightforward style that prized the immediacy of sensation over devotion to traditional structures. He was continually seeking to write in a way that made his forms an extension of his content, giving his readers the most access to the essence of his work. In an interview with Don Byrd, he described his process in the following terms: "I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible." For Creeley, the texture of his poetry and its messages had to be unified, and tangible to his audience right away. While Creeley's later style became increasingly spare, the core tenets of his approach did not waver significantly. He maintained a very literal style. Other poets and critics remarked that while his subject matter and tone may have shifted, he kept a similarly grounded voice, one that changed only in, as writer Stephanie Burt remarked in an essay about Creeley, "the attitudes and goals around which the small, clear crystals of his verse might form."
Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1926. At the age of four, he lost his sight in one eye after an accident. As a young man, he developed a blossoming interest in writing and literature, contributing regularly to his school's literary publication. He attended Harvard University briefly, but was put off by the dismissive attitudes he perceived in his teachers. From there he went on to join the military, working as an ambulance driver in India and Southeast Asia. After returning to the U.S., Creeley pursued a master's degree from the University of New Mexico and began a career in teaching. Creeley also began a correspondence with famed poet William Carlos Williams, who, in turn, connected him with poet Charles Olson. In the intervening years, Olson and Creeley would develop a close working relationship and friendship.
As a result of this acquaintance, Creeley would join the inner circle of Black Mountain Poets, writers all associated with the free-thinking liberal arts institution known as Black Mountain College. This group included Olson as well as Hilda Morley, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, and others. Heavily informed by lengthy discussions with Creeley, Olson worked out the concept of "Projective Verse," which would become the title of his seminal essay on the subject. Olson, guided by Creeley's precept about form as an extension of content, made the radical suggestion that poets do away with inherited poetic structures and seek to pursue a more open methodology of composition. He stated the need, in this model, for perceptions to be interlinked, following each other naturally over the course of a work. Their work on this subject would lead to a seismic shift in their generation of poets, offering an entirely new avenue of stylistic exploration. In the wake of a divorce, Creeley would relocate to San Francisco and become linked with some of the luminaries of the Beat Generation, like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg. His writing during this period was respected but not widely recognized outside the circle of his peers.
This would change significantly in 1962, with the publication of his collection, For Love. Receiving positive reviews almost immediately, the book was hailed as a significant milestone in innovative verse. Contemporary readers remarked on the brevity, naturalism, and tactile directness of Creeley's style. His reputation was further bolstered in 1967 with the release of another collection, Words. Writers marveled at the way in which Creeley seemed to be writing directly from a kind of shared American subconscious, in lines that were uncluttered with decorous flourishes or stuffy literary precepts. At the same time, for all the freedoms they saw in his work, his supporters also appreciated the close attention to detail he paid to the rhythm and shape of his lines. Creeley was heavily influenced by the improvisatory looseness of jazz, often playing the music of high-flying saxophonist Charlie Parker as he wrote. Beneath the surface of casual diction, they were able to admire the subtle strangeness of his line breaks as well as his quiet use of rhyme. These subtleties were particularly evident when hearing his reading of his work. Creeley also maintained certain structure elements across his work, employing regular length stanzas, usually quatrains and tercets. He also made frequent, and unusual, use of enjambment, breaking up short lines across stanzas. In this regard, Creeley most closely resembled his early mentor William Carlos Williams, carefully crafting poems that looked simple. In this same period, Creeley met his second wife, Bobbie Louise Hall, and took a teaching job at a private school in Albuquerque. Even in the wake of this success, he began to further pare down his aesthetic in subsequent works.
His collection Later (1979) was noted for its more pronounced focus on time, memory, and the progression of life. Many critics saw it as the distillation of the autumnal phase of Creeley's career, moving away from his earlier thematic preoccupations with romance and relationships and towards a more reflective mode. The collection engaged in a lengthy revisiting of various points in Creeley's life, ranging from childhood to family scenes to his writing process. His 1998 collection Life and Death would see him revisit and amplify these themes. Creeley would continue to be prolific even in the last phase of his career, publishing a book almost every year between 1995 and 2003. At the same time, he taught at the State University of New York-Buffalo for more than thirty years. His colleagues regularly commented on the openness with which he treated them and his students. He received a number of prestigious prizes and fellowships, including the coveted Bollingen Prize and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He died, at the age of 78, in Odessa, Texas.
